ChunkLOD is a Vintage Story mod by BiasHyperion. ChunkLOD extends the horizon with simplified, colored terrain based on world heightmaps, biomes, forests, rocks, and water.
Why this mod is worth installing
Useful for explorers and builders who want to read distant landscapes, mountain ranges, forests, and coastlines without loading full-detail chunks.
What ChunkLOD adds
ChunkLOD is a terrain level-of-detail system derived from the Farseer approach. It creates simplified 3D heightmaps from loaded world data, allowing the landscape silhouette and broad color patterns to remain visible far beyond the ordinary render distance. Distant terrain is not made of full chunks: trees, buildings, and individual blocks are omitted in favor of a lightweight representation that blends into the sky and fog.
The appearance reflects the world itself. Surface rock influences the base color, forest density adds green shading, water areas receive blue tones, and biome and elevation information help distinguish deserts, wooded regions, basalt landscapes, and snowy high ground. Lighting changes with the time of day, so the distant view is not locked to a permanent midday look.
A world-specific SQLite store keeps height and coloring data so it can be reused by players joining the same server with the mod available. The data is compact, but it is static until the relevant terrain is recorded again, meaning later changes to blocks or structures may not immediately appear in the distant representation.
The in-game menu opened with Ctrl+Shift+F provides live controls for far distance, detail resolution, mixed detail, sky and light influence, fading, face lighting, and optional globe curvature. Mixed detail can preserve more resolution near the player while simplifying the far horizon, helping balance clarity and performance.
Where to download ChunkLOD
The official Vintage Story Mod DB page is the right place to get the current release through the in-game mod manager.